THE EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF SUPERSYMMETRY BREAKING

If Nature is supersymmetric at the weak interaction scale, what can we hope to learn from experiments on supersymmetric particles? The most mysterious aspect of phenomenological supersymmetry is the mechanism o f spontaneous supersymmetry breaking. This mechanism ties the observab le pattern of supersymmetric particle masses to aspects of the underly ing unified theory at very small distance scales. In this article, I w ill discuss a systematic experimental program to determine the mechani sm of supersymmetry breaking. Both pp and e(+)e(-) colliders of the ne xt generation play an essential role.